In research that could ultimately lead to many new medicines, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a potentially general approach to design drugs from genome sequence. As a proof of principle, they identified a highly potent compound that causes cancer cells to attack themselves and die."This is the first time therapeutic small molecules have been rationally designed from only an RNA sequence - something many doubted could be done," said Matthew Disney, PhD, an associate professor at TSRI who led the study.

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